Fiscal Centralization and Decentralization in Russia and China: Elliott Parker and Judith Thornton docx

UNR Economics Working Paper Series Working Paper No. 06-013 Fiscal Centralization and Decentralization in Russia and China Elliott Parker and Judith Thornton Department of Economics /0030 University of Nevada, Reno Reno, NV 89557-0207 (775) 784-6850│ Fax (775) 784-4728 email: elliottp@unr.edu December, 2006 Abstract In this paper we review the fiscal evolution of China and Russia, asking how the process of creating a separate, tax-financed public sector in the two countries differed. We observe that the size of China's budget sector was consistently smaller than in Russia and that budget decentralization was consistently greater. We see both pros and cons in China's decentralization. Local governments that were allowed to keep marginal increases in local tax revenue had incentives to pursue growth-supporting policies, including support for foreign investment and export-oriented production. However, in the absence of financial markets, there were barriers to investment outside the local region, resulting in inefficient use of capital and protectionism. Fiscal deficits and rapid expansion of credit have threatened stability in both countries, but China has proved more successful than Russia in managing macroeconomic policies. Finally, we argue that Russia's status as a petro-state makes management of the public sector particularly difficult. In Russia, recentralization has been associated with expansion of state ownership of enterprises and production by territorial governments, state ministries, state banks, and the natural monopolies. JEL Classification: H6, H7, P35 Keywords: Fiscal decentralization, Russia, China, regional growth Fiscal Centralization and Decentralization in Russia and China Elliott Parker University of Nevada, Reno and Judith Thornton University of Washington December 31, 2006 Abstract: In this paper we review the fiscal evolution of China and Russia, asking how the process of creating a separate, tax-financed public sector in the two countries differed. We observe that the size of China's budget sector was consistently smaller than in Russia and that budget decentralization was consistently greater. We see both pros and cons in China's decentralization. Local governments that were allowed to keep marginal increases in local tax revenue had incentives to pursue growth- supporting policies, including support for foreign investment and export- oriented production. However, in the absence of financial markets, there were barriers to investment outside the local region, resulting in inefficient use of capital and protectionism. Fiscal deficits and rapid expansion of credit have threatened stability in both countries, but China has proved more successful than Russia in managing macroeconomic policies. Finally, we argue that Russia's status as a petro-state makes management of the public sector particularly difficult. In Russia, recentralization has been associated with expansion of state ownership of enterprises and production by territorial governments, state ministries, state banks, and the natural monopolies. JEL Codes: H6, H7, P35 Keywords: Fiscal decentralization, Russia, China, regional growth Contact information: Professor Judith Thornton Department of Economics University of Washington Box 353330, Savery 302 Seattle, WA 98195 Phone: (206) 543-5784 E-mail: thornj@u.washington.edu 1 1. Introduction: Fiscal Autonomy in Russia and China Because of their size, strategic importance, and the magnitude of the institutional changes they have experienced during economic transition, the economic policies and performance of Russia and China provide dramatic experiments for the social scientist. A key element of each country’s transition has been the attempt to construct a fiscal system providing a coherent framework for accountability of the government’s use of public funds. At the end of the 1990s, the contrast between China’s rapid growth and structural change and Russia’s economic decline focused attention on the difference in Chinese and Russian governmental institutions and policies. Today, as Russia enjoys the short-run benefits of exchange rate depreciation and high energy prices, the contrast between the two economies has weakened. Yet, China’s rapid structural change and integration into the world market stands in contrast to Russia’s continued role as an exporter of raw materials. In both countries, the early years of transition were associated with fiscal decentralization. In each of the transition economies, fiscal decentralization was a central piece of economic policy reform, for, as reforming economies became more decentralized and market-based, the public finances became the primary instrument for supplying public goods, protecting vulnerable members of society, and maintaining growth and stability. Yet, while fiscal decentralization fostered rapid growth in China, in Russia, de facto fiscal decentralization had dire consequences. Russia’s decentralization was an unintended consequence of state failure at the center, as the central government transferred more and more of its expenditure obligations onto regional governments that lacked access to tax revenues and administrative capacity. In both countries, a period of strong decentralization was followed by a recentralization of tax revenues to the center, beginning in 1995 in China and in 1999 in Russia. In China, the tax reform of 1994 established clear tax sharing rules, assigning a growing share of tax revenue to the center. In Russia, too, a new tax code legislated in 1998-2002, assigned the largest sources of tax revenue, notably the value added tax and export taxes to the federal government. In each case, the motivation for re-centralization 2 was the improvement of institutional infrastructure and creation of a social safety net for the most vulnerable members of society. But much remains to be done in both countries. Today, the budget structures of the two countries show many formal similarities, but the de facto operations of central and sub-national bureaucracies diverge. Most Western discussions of fiscal efficiency start from the assumption that there is a separate, tax-based fiscal system in place. However, neither Russia nor China has succeeded fully in establishing an effective, tax-based system for provision of local infrastructure, pensions, and a social safety net. The reform of the governmental fiscal system in each country is incomplete. Fiscal systems in Russia and China differ in characteristics that cut across the assignment of responsibilities between the center and sub-national levels. We argue that a key difference between Russian and Chinese fiscal performance lies not only in the degree of decentralization, but, rather, in China’s greater success in creating an autonomous fiscal system separate from other economic activity. Although China’s delivery of health, educational, and infrastructure services at the local level depends on an array of extra-budgetary fees, the delivery of public services appears to be more transparent than in Russia. We posit that the Russian fiscal system presents noteworthy shortcomings relative to the Chinese system. These include lack of transparency in the capture of energy revenues, lack of integration of fiscal expenditures into a unified Treasury system, and massive implicit subsidies in relationships between producers and both national and sub- national governments. Further, we argue that, at least in the rapidly-growing coastal provinces of China, the public sector in China is moving more rapidly than in Russia toward a greater orientation to growth-supporting activities. With all its shortcomings, the emerging sub-national public sector in China appears to have stronger incentives to foster the expansion of competitive foreign-assisted and non-state firms than does the Russian state. Although high energy prices currently generate a strong budget surplus in Russia, the Russian government has done little to foster diversification of its economy. 3 2. The Effects of Fiscal Decentralization Decentralization of governmental fiscal responsibility has been a component of much economic reform, providing contradictory evidence of the economic consequences. The case for fiscal decentralization rests on the assumption of heterogeneity of regional preferences or the benefits of competition. When communities have heterogeneous tastes, the government closest to the citizens can deliver a bundle of services that reflects community preferences. Similarly, the Tiebout model (1956) posits that, with capital and labor mobility, local governments are motivated by competition with other governments to provide public goods efficiently. Alternatively, centralization may work better when externalities are present, or when the central government is unable to credibly commit to hard budget constraints (Rodden, Eskeland, & Litvack, 2003). Decentralization in command economies that lack mechanisms for horizontal exchange often proves disastrous (Kornai, 1992: 406). Regional governments devolve into autarkies, capital and labor are not mobile, and the decentralized response to central targets requires destabilizing fiscal bailouts. Qian and Roland (1996) argue that fiscal decentralization is one of several factors affecting the hardness of local government’s budget constraint. Qian and Roland (1998) model fiscal decentralization as a commitment device for the central government when fiscal competition increases the opportunity costs of bailouts. Comparing Russia and China, Blanchard and Shleifer (2001) argue that political centralization in China imposed discipline on regional governments, facing local officials with dismissal in the event of short-run rent seeking. A common feature of federations is that different levels of government share a common tax base. An implication is that tax policies established by one locality will affect taxes collected by other localities as well as by the center. Such tax externalities can lead to inefficient choices of tax rates by localities for several reasons. First, if there is mobility of producers between jurisdictions, there will be horizontal tax externalities. An increase in one province’s tax rate, given the tax rates in other provinces, will lead to an outflow of the tax base to other regions. The consequence is that the marginal cost of public revenues will be perceived by the region to be higher than the true marginal cost. 4 This induces provinces to set tax rates on mobile resources that are too low from an efficiency point of view. Second, when central and sub-national governments share a common tax base, there are vertical tax externalities between levels of government that are taxing the same common pool. An increase in a province’s tax rate causes its tax base to fall, which in turn causes tax revenues to fall both for the regional and for the central government. The province, in choosing its tax policies, will neglect the adverse effect of its actions on federal revenues. Thus, it will consider its marginal cost of public funds to be lower than the true value, leading it to set too high a tax rate. Further, when there are information asymmetries between regional governments and the center, additional common pool problems arise in the regional competition for federal transfers. If sub-national spending is financed in total or in part by transfers from the center, while the federal transfers are financed by a general tax on the total tax base, then regions will view federal transfers as a common pool. With information asymmetries, regions have incentives to undertake actions that will increase the in-flow of transfers and shift the tax burden to other regions. Local government may shelter local producers or tolerate an informal economy to reduce central taxes (Cai & Treisman, 2004). The center, in response, may conceal rents, for example, in the off-shore profits of Gazprom. Looking at the political consequences of decentralization, Weingast (1995) proposes that a properly designed decentralization is one way to make government more accountable to its citizens. He uses the term “market-preserving federalism” for a fiscal decentralization that provides (1) a clearly delineated scope of governmental authority, (2) strong authority of sub-national governments in their jurisdictions, (3) centrally enforced prohibitions of barriers to trade and factor mobility, (4) hard budget constraints on revenue sharing and borrowing, (5) legal protection of the authority of sub-national government including protection from federal confiscation, and, thus, offers (6) incentives for regional governments to compete for investment and entry of new business. Our view of the Chinese case suggests to us that, in the coastal provinces of China, local governments, which retained most of marginal tax increases, and, thus, 5 expected to benefit from foreign direct investment and the opening of their local economies to the world market, had incentives to pursue growth-supporting economic policies. In Russia, in contrast, the source of increased governmental revenue depended more on rising prices of energy than on increased productivity in industry. Regions derived little revenue from the rising value of their resources and strove to shelter their income from what they considered federal expropriation. 3. Initial Conditions in Russia and China Many of the differences we see in Russian and Chinese fiscal institutions today can be attributed to differences in the initial command economies of the Soviet Union and China. On the eve of economic reform, the Soviet Union and China shared many common features of the command economy, including state ownership of industry, collectivized agriculture, the centralized coordination of economic activities by an administrative hierarchy taking its direction from a Communist Party, an absence of true market prices, and the lack of legal alternatives to administrative plans. It is these features that led Russian economists to wryly observe that the centrally-planned system could solve problems that other economies didn’t even have. The socialist fiscal system was implicit in the vertical structure of planning and prices. In the Soviet Union, virtually all investment activity was channeled through the budget. The primary nominal sources of tax revenue were enterprise profits and resource rents, turnover taxes charged on the difference between retail prices of consumer goods and their nominal enterprise cost, and profits of a foreign trade monopoly. Loans from the central bank provided the treasury with an additional, inflationary source of spending, even though administrative pricing transformed this inflation into chronic shortages. In pre-reform China, too, savings were centralized in the government sector and investment was allocated by the government. The tax system was implicit in the terms of trade established between agriculture and industry. China maintained strict control over labor, a monopoly of agricultural procurement, and monopoly supply of industrial consumer goods. Supplies of food and non-food consumer goods were scarce and subject to strict rationing. Low agricultural procurement prices and high industrial prices allowed 6 the industrial sector to generate a surplus from profits and taxes equal to 25 percent of GDP (Naughton, 1996: 34). However, in 1978, China differed from the Soviet Union in its resource endowment and economic structure. China was poor, and agriculture remained the dominant economic activity. Peasants suffered from high rates of under-employment and vulnerability to income shocks. In contrast to the Soviet Union’s large, vertically- integrated state enterprises, Chinese industrial output was produced in relatively smaller state firms as well as in small collectives. Infrastructure was weak, and there was little capacity to move commodities between provinces. Decentralization of the planning system in China was linked to financial decentralization as well. Sub-national governments and firms controlled depreciation allowances and profits of small-scale firms, which they could use for regional investment. Regional governments had instruments to influence the directions of local economic activity and incentives to use resources for growth (Wong, 1985). Thus, Chinese central planners concentrated on a limited menu of tasks and elevated regional self-sufficiency to a virtue. Qian, Roland, and Xu (2005) and Roland (2000:56-65) capture the stylized difference of Russian and Chinese coordination in their modeling of U-form and M-form organizations. Soviet, vertically-integrated branch divisions represented U-form structures formed along functional lines, while in China, regionally-decentralized, M- form structures could coordinate activities across all industries in a single region. These decentralized arrangements reduced information costs, facilitated small-scale experimentation, and contributed to China’s increased flexibility. However, in the absence of horizontal product and input markets, decentralization led to wasteful duplication and barriers to the movement of goods between provinces. Still, Qian, Roland, and Xu identify as a defining characteristic of Chinese decentralization the ability to accommodate decentralized experiments in the pursuit of reform. After the fact, decentralization that linked local tax collection to local expenditure provided incentives to pursue growth-supporting policies. Such experimentation is an important component of China’s gradual transition. 7 4. Evolution of the Chinese Fiscal System: Decentralization and Growth China’s fiscal system has gone through three basic phases. Before 1979, the central government had a formal monopoly over both revenues and expenditures. Between 1979 and 1993, under the economic reforms championed by Deng Xiaoping and his supporters, this fiscal system changed to a fiscal contract system, but there were at least six different types of contracts between provinces and the center, and little consistency between provinces or over time. Provinces generally collected most of the revenue and then turned over a contracted portion to the center – sometimes a quota amount, sometimes a fixed share, sometime a combination of the two. During this period, total fiscal revenues declined significantly as a share of GDP, and the center’s share of revenue also declined. The decentralized, experimental nature of early economic reform is clear in Chinese establishment of Special Economic Zones – export-oriented enclaves that were allowed to detach themselves partially from the central administrative apparatus and to operate with considerable autonomy. Guangdong, which was allowed to set up its own foreign trade corporations, was a pioneer. On the eve of reform, Guangdong seemed to have few advantages. It had few natural resources, a low ratio of arable land per capita, and high rates of rural unemployment. But its coastal location and proximity to Hong Kong presented the opportunity to forge a greater-Hong Kong trade area, linking enterprises to the world market, attracting foreign investment, and employing under- utilized labor. In 1979, the province’s political leaders negotiated a lump-sum transfer agreement with the center, under which they promised to transfer a fixed annual tax payment to the center, but would be allowed to retain all the additional revenues collected above that amount (Cheung, 1998, 89-137). Fujian, too, was permitted to open its economy in 1978. In 1980, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen were established as Special Economic Zones, and, in 1984, 14 additional coastal cities were designated as coastal open cities under arrangements that offered lower tax rates, higher local shares of tax revenues, and special institutional and policy environments providing substantial local autonomy (Lin, Tao, and Liu, 2006). Knight and Shi (1999) document some fundamental relationships and patterns in the Chinese fiscal data during this period. They note a rising share of spending by 8 provinces (from a third in early 1980s to two-thirds by 1990), and they observe that richer provinces enjoyed more spending, as a share of GDP, and more investment per capita. Fiscal transfers became less equalizing over time, thus transferring risk away from the center to the provinces. The fiscal contract systems often faced the province with a high marginal tax rate, and thus acted as a disincentive for tax collection in the provinces. In the late 1980s and again in the early-mid 1990s, the central government’s fiscal balance was threatened by a declining revenue share, and the CPI inflation rate rose to above 24 percent in 1994. As Figure 1 illustrates, the inflation was not the result of budget deficits – since the total budget deficit never exceeded 1.2 percent of GDP during this period – but, instead, resulted from credit expansion as the state banking system was used to fund essentially state expenditures. Between 1992 and 1995, M2 grew by an average annual rate of 36 percent, mostly due to lending to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) even as their share of output and profitability declined. Each year, an increasing number of state-owned enterprises became unprofitable, often because of the burden of social services, pensions, and excess employment they were forced to provide. Government credits from local branches of the big four national state-owned banks allowed enterprises to share the costs of structural change, but at the cost of rising debt. While China’s inflation rates were low at the time compared to Russia’s hyperinflation, they nonetheless threatened macroeconomic stability and the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1993-94, when the “Socialist Market Economy” policy encouraged a new wave of reform, fiscal reforms were put in place to clarify fiscal revenues and responsibilities, and it included three components: a tax-sharing system, tax modernization, and a reform of tax administration that separated central and provincial tax collection. The new tax- sharing arrangements allocated certain sources of revenues to the center (e.g., customs duties, consumption tax, sales tax, and profit taxes from centrally-controlled enterprises), to the provinces and municipalities (taxes on local enterprise income, house and property taxes, profit turnover taxes) and shared according to a predetermined ratio (the value- added tax, natural resource taxes, stock market trading tax). The tax modernization effort introduced new taxes to replace the former reliance on state enterprise profits, and it had the added effect of placing enterprises with different types of ownership on a relatively 9 [...]... Provincial units in both countries are extremely heterogeneous in their resource bases and incomes and transition has increased income disparities in both countries In Russia, the budget directed to pensions and health insurance is about 7.5 percent of GDP—larger than in China However, central transfers in both countries are positively related to income levels and changes Fiscal Policies in China In. .. effects of fiscal and monetary decentralization When China recentralized its monetary authority under Zhu Rongji, inflation fell and local governments took the lead in laying off workers from loss-making state-owned enterprises (Qian and Roland, 1998) Jin, Qian, and Weingast (2005) observe that provincial revenues and expenditures were more closely correlated in the 1980s and 1990s than in the 1970s... and, in China, to maintain excess employment But China's growth is based on a rapid increase in the share of small and medium-sized firms while Russia' s small-scale sector has languished • In China, re -centralization of budget functions was associated with gradual separation of enterprise activities and the state sector In Russia, re -centralization has been linked with expanding state ownership and control... relative hardening of budget constraints They argue that, in China, a hard budget constraint provided local incentives to foster non-state development, increasing tax revenues and reducing state obligations Local benefits from economic growth also generated policies encouraging foreign direct investment Zhang and Zou (1998) present a contrary view of Chinese provincial data, arguing that fiscal decentralization. .. fiscal reform had led to increased fiscal disparities between provinces Because many public goods are provided 28 by local governments, basic needs in health care and education are not being met in many parts of China The lack of public health funding is particularly costly for the rural poor and the migrant workers seeking jobs in growing cities Fiscal Policies in Russia Russia’s initial years of transition... (2004) call fiscal decentralization a “handmaiden” to China’s growth Chen (2004) argues that regional and local governments have better information, and so more control over expenditures, leading to improved efficiency in government spending, and thus led to more growth Feltenstein and Iwata (2005) use national macro data to argue that decentralization led to both faster growth and higher inflation, but... replacement of market coordination for administrative direction • In China, there were many separate municipalities attracting foreign investment and growth In Russia, foreign direct investment has been channeled primarily through Moscow • In China, local governments that were allowed to keep marginal increases in local tax revenue had incentives to pursue growth-supporting policies These coastal regions... Although Russia has free labor markets and partially-free housing markets, out-migration from poor regions has been slow and one-third of employment is in the public sector • Fiscal deficits and rapid expansion of credit have threatened stability in both countries, but China has proved more successful than Russia in managing macroeconomic policies Russia s fiscal crisis in 1998 provides a warning to China... economic growth Lin and Liu (2000), on the other hand, question Zhang and Zou’s econometric model They show that if the model is extended to include the level of investment, and controlling variables measuring the impact of institutional reforms, then it appears that increased fiscal decentralization is associated with higher economic growth A recent empirical piece by Jin and Zou (2005) finds that a greater... in China In the initial fiscal decentralization of the early 1980s, provinces were given more control over revenues and expenditures, but they also faced unfunded mandates to prop up unprofitable state firms and maintain their social services The center allowed regions to retain a growing share of revenues In addition, provinces funded services with increases in extra-budgetary fees and political credits . Working Paper Series Working Paper No. 06-013 Fiscal Centralization and Decentralization in Russia and China Elliott Parker and Judith Thornton. Keywords: Fiscal decentralization, Russia, China, regional growth Fiscal Centralization and Decentralization in Russia and China Elliott Parker University